«The story of the Martyrs of Cordoba : a Triumph of Christian Resistance to Islam in Medieval Spain
When a monk named Isaac left his monastery in the year 851 AD and took the long road that led to the Roman bridge into Cordoba, he was preparing a public declaration of Christian faith. It would be an amazing defiance, one which would shake the landscape of Andalusia and help to alter the future of Spain. Isaac knew it would shock the Muslim authorities and that he would be punished for what he was about to do. He was never to know the true magnitude of his act or the far-reaching consequences of his words.
As he entered the Emir’s mighty palace, and went past the entrance of the harems (filled with captured Spanish women and slaves taken in the perpetual Jihad of the Christian north) the palace guards greeted him and let him pass. They had known him in his other life as grand secretary of the Caliph (katib adh-dhimam), the highest position held by any Christian. No one that day could have guessed this Spanish aristocrat was preparing himself to confront - in elegant court Arabic - the head of Andalusia’s revered Islamic judges. For this man that we know of only as Isaac, it would be the first time in his life that he would state his Christian beliefs publicly.
Isaac understood the Koran and Malikite jurisprudence as well as the legal discrimination of the Dhimma; he knew full well what to expect as a result of his Credo. There would follow a trial and swift death. Facing the assembled representatives of the Emir of Cordoba, he gathered his words, speaking calmly as he broke the most important commandment for survival as an infidel under Muslim rule: silence about your beliefs so as not to offend Muslims.
That encounter between infidel and master was the first chapter of the Martyrs of Cordoba. It proved to be merely the opening salvo of resistance. The subsequent struggle of wills between the subdued Christians of Spain and their Muslin conquerors launched ten years of trouble for the Muslims authorities of Spain. It also set the persecuted Europeans of the Iberian peninsula on the road to freedom. In spite of the renewed repression from the agents of the Emir, Andalusia would see a mass exodus of vast numbers of Christians. Escaping to the forested mountains of Asturias in the north, they deprived the Emir of his yearly revenue from the jizya, the life blood of the growing Muslim power in Andalucía.
This story has resonance even today; it offers an answer to the present assault on the West from Muslims who still demand submission and silence, with not one utterance of criticism permitted towards Islam, Muslims, or their Koran.»
Lede a entrada completa em Gates of Vienna.
Mártires de Córdoba, rogai por nós.
Sobre este tema, leia Moorish Spain de Richard Fletcher, livro parcialmente disponível no Google Books.
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